


Love, Unspoken

by bygosscarmine



Category: Sky High (2005)
Genre: Autumn, College, F/M, Fire, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Nature Magic, Post-High School, Romance, US Southern accent, plant bondage because Layla
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 22:19:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13727148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bygosscarmine/pseuds/bygosscarmine
Summary: After graduating from Sky High, Layla Williams is at the same college as Warren Peace--her ex Will Stronghold is supposed to visit, but there’s something she and Warren really need to work out.(finished 4500 word one-shot in 3 sections)Probably upper T for suggestive content...





	1. Stronghold's Coming to Town

It was October, and the trees were illuminated red, orange, gold all across campus. Layla rested against the heavy comfort of an old oak with roots she could feel tickled by streams far beneath the drying grass. It helped her steady herself, though she still was daydreaming. Autumn tended to hit her strong, and today with her eyes closed, the things appearing under her lids made the oak smell uncharacteristically of jasmine. Bergamot. Sandalwood.

Stronghold was coming through town, and wanted to have dinner. Ironic, how that made Layla think of Warr. Stronghold reminded her of high school, which was too bad. Their childhood had been great, but high school hadn’t ended on a high note. Not a bad one, just…not a high.

Warr was actually going to university here, too—not a huge coincidence. It was one of the few schools that was briefed on Sky High—or at least, given a strong governmental incentive to accept the few alumni who went on to college.

“Hey, Layla!” She jumped, eyes opening, but it was just a guy she recognized from her poetry course. He was hailing her from across the quad green. “What are you doing to that poor tree?”

She got that kind of half-joking question a lot. This oak was very fond of her, and she hadn’t put any intent toward it, but it now folded its roots around her in a sort of chair. Layla waved, and then stood up, letting the tree settle back as it should be.

Stronghold was never on time, but sometimes that meant he was an hour early and confused why she wasn’t where she’d said she would be. She started walking to the overpriced coffee bar in the student center, trying to keep her mind from wandering to the spice-of-autumn sort of things that would make the grass start rejuvenating. Will knew her too well—it would be embarrassing.  
With anyone else of more finesse, it would have been weird to go from being high school lovers back to just friends. That was just the way Stronghold was, though.

She’d forgotten pretty quickly, herself, when he’d moved on within weeks.  
Warr hadn’t been the reason she and Stronghold had ended things, which in retrospect was a little funny. But then, he’d graduated the year before.  
Stronghold had been your classic high school icon—ready to go be the superhero who was going to show up even his mom and dad as soon as he left Sky High. Freelancing as soon as he was of age.

At some point, though, she’d realized that maybe she didn’t want her power to define her. That she wanted to try college, and they were currently in a glorified vocational school. He hadn’t understood that, at all, that she didn’t want to be his sidekick-slash-homemaker.

“I hear your annoying ex is going to be here?”

Warr’s voice had been gravelly in high school—and largely lost on her, barring a thought for smoke-damage. Now it had the kind of whorls and edges to it that make her think of late-night poetry, and shared glasses of wine.

“And you’re still walking my way?” she returned, without looking directly at him.

“He asked me to dinner, too. It’s been awkward since I broke up with him via text.” He had teamed up with Stronghold a couple of times, before he enrolled in university. “I think he’s playing the field, sugar.”

Warr had once said never to call him ‘cutie’–where did he get off calling her 'sugar’? To her, sugar wasn’t white sand in a jar, it was deep syrup from canes in tropical places.

She suspected he knew that. Though there were also odd notes of Southern courtesy to him—maybe from the grandmother who had raised him.

“I might have to start calling you a hero, for rescuing me like this,” she said.

“You just never learn.”

“Nope.”

Layla kept her eyes on the ugly, geometric building they aimed for, off his face, and the twig-brown eyebrows that were so expressive when the rest of his face stayed still.

“Wanna bet he pulls a flying entrance today?” she asked.

“Not on my life. There hasn’t been a Stronghold sighting on this side of the Potomac in a year. Of course he’ll fly in.”

There was a pretty young maple by the door of the building, and the groundskeeper hadn’t got to it with his leaf-blower, yet. The musk and spice of the leaves disintegrating back into the soil, and crushed underfoot on the concrete rose to meet her. She knew a second before it happened that she’d bump into Warr as they both reached for the door–and she let it happen, anyway.

He smiled, and Layla saw his eyes, and the leaves smelled a little more like sandalwood.

“Now you’re going to accuse me of being a gentleman,” he said, hauling open the heavy door, as she pulled her hand back, half-shielded with the green fingerless gloves she’d knit during lectures earlier this fall.

“I knew that about you when you turned up as my homecoming date in the nicest suit in the house.”

She’d been a scrawny freshman, brazening her way through a pitiful revenge plan. He’d only been sixteen, himself, though she couldn’t imagine it, now.

“That was a night where nothing went how it was supposed to,” he said in the black sarcasm that seemed to mean more, from him.

When Layla stepped into the coffee bar area, she saw the two girls there glance over, then drop their eyes to their books, fast, before getting settled to stare from behind their bangs. The one guy gave Warr a once-over and never moved on to Layla.

And he wasn’t even in his biker gear.

Layla wasn’t sure if Warr spent a lot of time in the gym or naturally packed on muscle, but he seemed twice her size. He still sat on the spindly bar stools with a grace Stronghold would never have. A grace even she didn’t have, she thought, having to untuck her scarf after sitting on it.

“How’s the poetry minor treating you?” Warren asked.

“I like the poetry. The other students tend to be bizarre. And that’s saying something, coming from one of us. What about you, Mr. Undecided?”

He had started a year after her. Boy, had seeing him here been a nearly physical shock.

“Oh, I’m decided. I’m getting a degree. In the least painful way possible. So far English is winning over Psychology on the merit of less intimidating course titles, but the balance shifts somewhere in the senior year requirements.”  
Layla was laughing at him when her phone rang.

“Hey, Layla,” said Stronghold, slightly out of breath, as usual. “Sorry. I’ve been called in to a briefing with…an important government agency. I’m not going to make it tonight. Don’t be mad!”

“I’m not mad, it’s okay. We’ll catch you later, right?”

“Yeah. Oh, tell Warren Peace good luck with school and everything! So weird to think of him in college, huh?”

“I’ll let you go,” Layla said. “Bye.”

Warren hadn’t really struggled in academics, as far as Layla knew. Socially and discipline-wise, yes.

“Is this good news?”

“Depends on your perspective. We’re not going to see him, so neither of us would have won that bet.”

“We should still go eat. Okay with taking my bike?”

He’d stopped wearing his bike gear everywhere. That did not mean he wasn’t still a biker.

She held onto him, arms circling the familiar jacket he’d left on his seat. Though she was always a bit horrified by leather, and the high tang of skin to it, it warmed between them like an old friend. This one smelled mostly of sulfur, and a little of gasoline. Like Warr.


	2. Dinner with Warr

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Staying friends with her ex Will Stronghold isn't always fun, but staying friends with Warren Peace is a lot more fraught.

Layla had discovered Thai food, on leaving suburbia, and while Warren had tended not to be into restaurants, they’d been there a couple of times. With Stronghold, once, and with Magenta when she’d come through the city on tour with her band.

Walking in with just Warr was nice. It was also a little intimidating. They sat facing each other in a booth, which would make it hard for her to not look directly at him. Layla counted herself lucky there was no greenery in their area.

“Having Will waltz in always takes me back to high school,” Layla admitted. “It makes me uneasy.”

“Wasn’t high school good to you? You were pretty, popular.” Warr said this without judgment—or flattery.

“I guess. I didn’t feel like I was at home there, though.”

“Poor little popular girl. And look at you now. Still someone everyone smiles at, even if they don’t really know you.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I know myself.” Layla was simmering now, autumn rhythms and the spices in the air from the food mixing together with the way the leather made a second skin on Warr’s shoulders. She’d just been holding onto those shoulders. “Like, I’m into nurturing the earth, but I’m also drawn to the opposite. Sometimes, if I’m too mad, I lose all that perspective of being peaceful with the environment, and…I don’t know. Manifest the anger of Mother Nature? It sounds stupid, out loud.”

“Every power has contrasts. Every person does, really, but it’s just obvious with us. And that shadow side is what people think would make them a villain.”

“Isn’t it?”

Warr met her eye. In contrast to his fire, there was something icy in their connection right now.

“Is that what I am? My destructive shadow is in full force, and that’s what I used to defend people. Not the loving nurture of the kitchen stove.”

Their tea arrived. When the waitress had stepped away, Layla said, “I’m sorry. I know it’s nuanced. That’s what I’m trying to understand.”

“What is this dark side you have, Layla?” His smile was toothy, the shining contrast to his resting-glower. “I bet Will never even noticed it.”

Will just accepted her as Layla. She was the first kid with powers he’d ever known, and in a way she felt like she’d been his measure, alongside his parents, for other peoples’ worth.

“You know I’m ugly when I’m jealous. I give a good talk about grassroots change, but I’d much rather let ivy tear down buildings when I disagree with the business done in them. And I need to face it, I’m a coward about what I really feel strongly. All this hippie activism, that’s actually my mom’s passion, and it’s easy for me to support it. But what about art? What about getting rid of the division between support and hero? What about telling Will I don’t want to have dinner with him, and especially not with the three of us together?”

Earlier today, she’d been dreaming against the oak—she was a kindergarten teacher. After a day of doing story-time with the kids she’d let herself into Warren’s loft, sat on his lap, and had him read her sonnets while she felt his chest rumble with the words. Imaginary Warren was much less terrifying, even when she imagined him getting angry again—something she hadn’t seen in ages.

“Does it bother you, that we’re friends now, Will and I?”

There was a subtext here, but she wasn’t sure how to read it. His eyes were on the tag of his tea, which he batted at with a forefinger.

“Will and you? Why would it bother me?”

Their food was ready. The waitress was a little flirty, in the way that a much older woman can get away with. She asked about their majors before telling them about her daughter who was in their school.

Layla praised the food, and debated aloud about whether she was in any of the same classes with the girl, even after the waitress had moved on.  
Warr took the hint, and they talked about school business.

When they stepped back out of the restaurant, Layla half-wished and expected Warr to offer they go for dessert, or a movie, somewhere. Instead, though, he stood next to his bike, and said, “Do you get ugly when you’re jealous? That little game with Gwen Grayson was practically kiddie stuff. You made a decision that was petty, but that wasn’t ugly.”

“I would get jealous when Will and I were together, and it certainly wasn’t pretty.”

“Sometimes I wonder, Layla. If you let yourself feel those ugly emotions, at all. If you just smile because it’s the easiest. I definitely know you’re a coward about your feelings, but I think it’s about the ones you think you shouldn’t have, not that you get too worked up about the ones you approve of.”

“You make me sound like a robot.”

“I don’t relate, that’s all. I hide things, but only by not saying them. You lie out loud with your face, your implications, and the things you chose to do.”

“Let’s not fight,” Layla said, getting alarmed. Would he get so frustrated he left her there on the curb?

“We’re not fighting, not even close. How can I fight when you ask questions you won’t hear the answer to?”

He got on the bike, handed her the helmet.

Holding onto him as they rode back to campus felt entirely different. It was colder, and she could really only smell the garlic from dinner in her scarf.  
Warr walked her to her door, like he always did. There was a box spruce hedge around her dorm building, and usually it pulled back, to not catch at her clothes, getting rounder.

Tonight she held out a hand, and stuck it into the branches, to run her fingers through the leaves. What was she even feeling? Did Warr know how she felt? Was that why he was mad, or…

“I’ll see you around?” Warr said, as his goodbye.

“Don’t do it,” she said. He halted, a few steps down the path. “Don’t just pick a fight and then leave me wondering what it was about. I’m not used to it, okay? I only hung out with one boy all my life, and he was super-obvious. I don’t know much about what goes on inside your head, Warren Peace, but it’s not because I don’t wonder.”

He took a step back toward her.

“I did my little dance with my villain side in high school, you know that, but I’ve tried to be a decent dude. Realized I was dumb being threatened by Will. Even tried being a hero with him, but I run too hot, and I’m more a soldier than a fireman.” His little laugh at this was painful to hear. “So I went to college, instead. On some level I expected other supers here, but you? Still friends with Will, still running home between terms. That good little thing,” his accent appeared here, “that sweet little thing, makes flowers bloom and birds sing, hallelujah on Sunday morning. I’m a friend, I check in on you but don’t do anything that might scare you. You go and eat Thai food with me and joke about the lack of fortune cookies for me to learn pick-up lines from, and then you say, Why would I be bothered that you guys are still friends?

“Because I’m deadly jealous of you and Will, Layla. I want you to be torn about wanting me, and feeling that might make Will upset. I want you to stop dancing around this 'I have a dark side, too’ nonsense and own that you just want to possess the darkest thing you know.”

Leyla was shaking, and it wasn’t just because the night was cold enough for brilliant constellations.

“I knew you had a poetic streak to you,” she finally said. “I should have been more pushy about getting you to do the Modern course with me.”

“And this is your dark side, sugar. Provoking something, but then not giving anything back. Not being willing to risk it. Well, that’s my piece. Good night.”

Leyla was shaking so much with the adrenaline, with the conflict, that she couldn’t sleep until she put a sweatshirt on over her pajamas and curled into the tightest knot she could make of herself under her blankets. She got warmer, but the hollow gray of her stomach didn’t let her sleep well.

The next morning was Saturday. Warr could be anywhere—he worked in a truck for a moving company, lived over a garage where he did detailing, and did contracting work of some kind on a laptop he could pull out to use, slouched against pretty much anything. Layla had to see him, though—she’d wait on his steps all day if she had to.

And she had the persistence of an invasive weed.


	3. Say It With Flowers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (I haven't figured out how Warren sheds the vines, I leave it to your imagination)

She washed her face, taking off last night’s make-up a little belatedly. Just left her hair down, and went to his loft. The garage doors were open, and he was washing a car—someone else’s ostentatious red Corvette.

When he saw her, his frown of concentration turned to a smooth neutrality, which was something she’d never seen before. He picked up the phone as it rang, and turned his back on her.

Part of Layla’s invasive persistence was sticking around where she wasn’t really welcome, though. So while he wasn’t looking she went to the door up to his apartment.

She waited, like a penitent awaiting judgment, for over two hours. She wasn’t kneeling on hard rock, just laying on his couch. Still. The time was long. When he came up and saw her, he was still angry. And it looked new, not like something that had been settling for hours. He went toward the shower, taking off his shirt and jeans as if she wasn’t there, and disappearing for another fifteen minutes.

He emerged in a towel, and put his clothes on with the same disdain for her presence—she turned her eyes away at the last moment. His shoulders were ridiculously wide compared to his waist, and while she’d expected tattoos, his back was an expanse of brown skin and manual-labor musculature, barring a scar that looked punched out of his shoulder, and a script across the shoulder blade beside it.

He grabbed a button-up shirt, maybe changing for another job, started pulling his arms through it.

“You’re supposed to be sealing yourself up and getting away from the bad man who hurt your feelings,” he said, finally turning toward her.

“Stop being ridiculous,” she said. “Do you want me to finally give you my piece, or do you just want to gloat?”

“I’m not gloating. I’m pissed.”

“You know I like you.” She looked right back into his eyes, because this was the point of no return, already. “Maybe not how much, but you know you can hurt me, or you wouldn’t do such a precise job of it. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t sleep right last night. Not because you scare me. Because not being friends with you scares me. Warren, everyone may like me, but everyone wants you. You even used the words yourself, you know it.”

“Being wanted, being liked, I’ll tell you which is more pleasant.”

She’d been sitting up straight on the edge of the couch. Now Layla leaned forward, letting her own anger rise.

“I want you, too, of course. I avoid your eye because I don’t want you to read it on my blushing traitor face. I don’t stick around long when we hang out because plants do embarrassing things when I start to think about you. I let my mind wander a little too far, and then I have to make sure you don’t see me for a week because I’m sure the words I was thinking will crawl across my skin like a connect-the-dots with my freckles. Warr, what am I supposed to do? I’m so outclassed by you there was never any way I could tell you.”

He’d taken a couple of steps to get closer to her, to see her face as she spoke. Her eyes had dropped, noticing that his workman’s tan was a little light on his stomach, still bare since he hadn’t fastened the dress shirt.

“I don’t like excuses,” he said. “But for some reason, when you say them, Red, I believe them.”

She wanted to die. She wanted to melt like Ethan right into the grout. She couldn’t though, because he hadn’t finished yet.

He held his arms out to each side, pulling back the cuffs of the shirt. Tattoos of flame cuffed his wrists and forearms—she didn’t know why he’d got that done, or if it was partly natural. So much she didn’t really know about Warren.

“How do you feel about fire?”

“It burns, and it’s dangerous.” She had to be honest. “But it’s also thrilling to watch.”

“That seems a little impersonal. How do you feel about a super-villainous fire power?”

“Sexy,” she said, trying not to choke on the dryness of her throat. “But whether that’s just because of you I can’t say. You made an early impression on me.”

“You were such a kid,” he said, taking another step in, now only the coffee table between them. “You are still such a kid, because you’ve just lived so normally. How could I let anything happen? When we were both teenagers—well, even then I had some qualms. I was working for my living already and you were waiting for a not-boyfriend first love at a cheap Chinese place. But now? You’re still just a kid.”

Leyla decided she’d had enough being pushed around by Warren’s sex appeal, and that it was time to embrace a little of the more earthy Earth Goddess. The trailing ivy plant that hung nearby (an old gift of hers) had already been creeping toward her, blooming with unnaturally big flowers. She glanced at it, and it bound Warr from ankle to knees, little trailers running between the loops around him. He batted the coffee table aside, like it was only balsa wood, then he went down on his knees in front of her. Maybe something had changed about the way she looked, too, as she tapped that hungrier side of her power, because while he’d laughed at the ivy encircling his legs, when he looked up his expression changed.

“Is this something you planned in your fantasies?”

“I never, ever dreamed up anything this realistic,” she said.

His hands, always hot and dry, took her face to draw it closer. She leaned down to kiss him, too.

His lips were even more hot, to where if he’d been a regular human she’d have checked for fever. Warr’s hands pressed her in closer, and she moved down to bring their bodies together, getting on the floor in front of him. Warr pressed higher and higher against her, until his hips were between her thighs, and her back was curving against the seat of the couch.

Her face had gone so warm she wondered if she was sunburned, or if it was Warren, so close to her skin.

He lifted his head, as if to see if they were okay.

“You are so sweet,” he murmured, “why is everything about you so sweet and cool?”

She thought, because burnt sugar turns to candy, but she didn’t say it. Would he be able to remember, right now, that little endearment? His fingers ran through her hair, so straight and thin unlike his dark mane, now cropped so short she couldn’t bury her own fingers in it. She missed his wild-man hair, and even the way some days he’d smelled of working on cars in leather jackets.

“Contrast?” was all she could utter.

There was a cactus over the sink, far behind her, she was pretty sure was blooming five years too early.

He buried his face against her neck, kissed her shoulder, her collarbone. She enjoyed the inching down of his hands as he tried to find where was best to hold her, and when his thumbs dug into her belly, she squeezed him between her legs, and brought his lips back up to hers.

He was so long, against her, and she usually felt so brittle and green next to him. Today, though, the way he looked at her, she was instead a vine, insinuating and strong enough to tear down walls.

Her phone rang.

Warr growled, a tiny baby one compared to the rage she’d once seen him unleash, but still serious. He picked it up, even as she reached behind for it, and said, “What is it?”

It had to be Stronghold. Why else would he dare?

“No, you can’t come now. We’re busy.”

He slammed it shut to hang up.

There was a second where their eyes met, reality dashing between them. Will Stronghold would know. How did she feel about that? Was it okay for them to get here so fast?

Just then, Layla felt immensely glad. The tension of returning to her separate body, startled by the phone, made the places they still touched seem incredibly vital.

She put her own cool hands on Warr’s waist, and leaned in close again.

But he grabbed her, and stood, carrying her not as if she weighted nothing, but as if he enjoyed her weight in his arms.

“Flowers like you need sunlight,” he said.

He set her on the futon bed on the other side of the apartment, and then went and pulled the curtains further open, so the sun streamed in from the mid-day sky. She held still, though she wanted to tense up, to retreat. Her foot was bare on his sheets, her jeans tight enough they felt almost like she wasn’t covered.

“Sometimes you remind me of the sun,” she said, in a whisper, embarrassed to even say it.

He knelt beside her, and fingered her shirt, but when she squeezed her eyes shut, he stopped. He set himself down beside her, set her head on his arm, and covered her leg on the mattress with his own knee.

“Sugar, I think you turn your face toward me more than sometimes,” he said.

For a while, they just enjoyed being with each other. She called him “sunshine” in return, more than once. He whispered right against her ear that the scent of honeysuckle had haunted him since she’d asked him to Homecoming, that freshman year. She confided that she wanted to be a teacher for small hero kids, and have her own babies, too. He told her that he ate dinner with his mom every Sunday, and it felt like visiting an aging Broadway star. That it was almost time for his trip to Louisiana to clean up Gammy’s grave.

She promised to go, and make it prettier than any grave in all the land. He kissed her again, then, and this time they didn’t stop.


End file.
